Always rethinking the Southeast Asian past

In the 1880s, the compilers of a new geography of the Nguyễn Dynasty realm, the Đồng Khánh địa dư chí 同慶地與誌, included information about the customs of the people in virtually every administrative district of the kingdom. In the process, they of course included information about minority peoples who resided in places like the mountainous province of Hưng Hóa 興化 to the west of the Red River delta, where they recorded that the Thổ 土 people of Sơn La 山羅 and Phù Yên 扶安 subprefectures both spoke “gibberish” (chu li 侏離).

Then at some point in the first half of the twentieth century, someone affiliated with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the premier research institute in French Indochina at the time, collected some manuscripts from this same area. Labeled collectively as “savage texts” (man thư 蠻書), additional cataloging information makes it clear that some of these writings had been produced by Đeo Tiền Suối “savages” from Bản Thải in the Phù Yên – Sơn La area.

“Bản” comes from a Tai-language word for village, “baan,” while “Đeo Tiền” is a subgroup of a language family known as the Iu Mien or Yao. So it looks like what the compilers of the Đồng Khánh địa dư chí referred to with the single term of “Thổ people” was actually at least a couple of groups of people who spoke very different languages, namely what are now referred to in Vietnam as Dao (Yao language speakers) and Thái (Tai language speakers). What is more, while Nguyễn Dynasty officials might have dismissed the languages of these two peoples as gibberish, the Dao and Thái both recorded information in their languages,

There are many sources in Dao and Thái that remain today, however very few people can read them, and there is very little scholarship based on these texts. Recently there was a “Yao Script Project” in northwestern Vietnam that tried to preserve works and promote literacy in Yao/Dao (there is a good report on it here). However, we are unfortunately still a long ways away from seeing the information in Dao and Thái texts employed in the writing of histories by scholars today.

The Nguyễn Dynasty ruled over a multi-lingual realm in which various peoples recorded information in their own languages (Dao, Thái, Cham, Khmer, etc.). There were therefore multiple “voices” in the past. The ruling elite at the time, however, viewed such voices merely as “gibberish.”

Today it would be nice to see a history of “Vietnam” that would allow such silent voices to be heard.

leminhkhai

4 thoughts on “The Other Voices in “Vietnamese” History”

Did the Mien (Dao) use Chinese characters in way to write their own language or did it use in a fashion similar to spoken Chinese? Mien and Hmong have grammar conventions very similar to Chinese, but they are classified into their own family tree.

Thank you for commenting. The quick answer is “I don’t know!” That is why I want to learn Dao/Mien/Yao.

When I look at the Dao documents I have, sometimes I understand (because it is the same as Chinese) and sometimes I don’t (even though they are still using Chinese characters).

Let me say this. You are using the name “Bai Yue” so I’m not sure if you are familiar with Vietnam or not, but the Vietnamese had a way of writing their spoken language called “Nom.” Nom was a written script that was based on Chinese characters.

What many people don’t realize is that documents were not written in “either” Nom “or” classical Chinese, because the difference between the two was not very clear.

Why? Because something like 80% of the vocabulary in the “Vietnamese” language comes from Chinese. So you can find (and I have read) documents in Nom that are 80 or 90% classical Chinese. About the only thing “Vietnamese” in such documents is the verb “to be” – là.

So knowing NOTHING about Dao, I would nonetheless guess that the situation there might be the same. It might be possible to read something that is very “Dao” (because there is little in it that is “Chinese”), and then it might be possible to have a “Dao” document that is very “Chinese.”

Most Chinese dialects when written are based classical chinese, but there are instances where new characters were made up to represent their native dialects like Cantonese. Cantonese characters don’t make much sense to a Mandarin only speaker. The Zhuang and Viets both have their own character systems as well to represent their native languages. The origin of Viet language seems like an unique case because its grammar is similar to Khmer, but its highly tonal like Chinese. Vietnamese seem to develop tonality from somewhere. Even ancient chinese language was even claimed to have no tonality originally. Only Thai and Hmong/Mien were traced by linguists to have tonality in their ancient languages. Frankly, Japanese and Korean doesn’t sound as pleasant to hear when they speak in Mandarin in comparison to Lao, Thai, or Viets.